Moo

by Smiley, Jane

  WHEN THE CLAM BUCKET took its first bite out of the wall of Earl Butz’ suite, Earl had been awake for quite some time. The first thing he’d done upon hearing the distant thunder of Old Meats coming down was to kick his straw into a comfy mound and curl up in it as best he could. As the noise got louder, he shook his head at it, did his best to bury his ears in the straw, but then it didn’t cease, it only amplified. Earl stood up and paced his quarters restively, hardly aware of the shooting pains in his legs and trotters. As the din grew overpowering, he consulted his limited memory for a precedent, but none occurred to him. In the end, he was reduced to cowering, without a shred of dignity, in the corner of his pen most distant from the racket. While he would have preferred even then to at least give the appearance of ignoring it all, he could not do so. Then the clam bucket broke the wall, let in the dusty bright light of day and a vision of the blue sky upon two alarmed and staring black eyes. Earl pressed himself against the solid and reassuring back wall.

  The air was cold. Earl gasped as the clam bucket took another bite and widened the hole. A new sensation rolled over his pale and bristly hide, the refreshing sensation of chill. It woke him right up, right out of the frightened stupor he had been declining into. He raised his snout and momentarily closed his eyes, then he staggered back to his feet.

  While Earl would never have claimed that anyone was neglecting him lately—Bob still came five times a day, still kept his pen clean, still turned the radio on for him, still fed him his special mix, still scratched his back with a stick and chatted with him while he worked—it was clear that some je ne sais quoi had gone out of their whole common endeavor. Just as Bob was hardly ever weighing him anymore, or conducting other measurements, Earl himself was only going through the motions, chow-wise. True, he was going through ALL the motions—chewing, swallowing, digesting, and eliminating—his intake had not fallen off. But he didn’t pay much attention to it anymore. Had Dr. Bo Jones been stateside to reflect upon the matter, he might have concluded that Earl had been bred to eat himself to death before he was a year, or at most two years, old, and as a result of death being delayed, Earl had run past the possibilities of his genetic endowment, and was now only marking time.

  What was clear to Earl as the clam bucket took yet another bite and let in yet more light, air, and chill was that the change he had been waiting for was upon him, and that he had better seize his opportunity while he had the chance.

  Even so, the clam bucket itself was a powerfully daunting sight, and Earl had to summon all of his inner resources to withstand the fear it aroused in him, the way it swung and crashed against the remaining walls, the deafening grinding noise as it clamped down upon and ripped away what had constituted the immutable limits of Earl Butz’ world. Most hogs couldn’t have stood it. Helplessly distant and frantic, Bob Carlson assumed that Earl himself couldn’t stand it. But as frightened as he was by the unusual movement and noise of the object, Earl’s Christmas vision had prepared him for what it disclosed—the outdoors. As soon as he saw it, he wanted to get to it, and he fully expected to find what he had found there before—a welter of fragrances, of green grass and happy hog farm sights and sounds. The bucket swung and bit, arcing closer and closer to where Earl cowered against the wall. Finally, it swung against the bars of his pen and slammed them to the floor. A few moments later, all the rumbling, roaring, and crashing subsided into silence, and all Earl could hear was the outer breeze and some distant shouts. His mound of straw lifted and blew around the room, and Earl stepped forward two or three tentative paces.

  BOB, who had been running back and forth with his hands over his ears, saw the crane operator open the door of the cab and climb down, his lunch in his hand. The other men, too, came out of their trucks and headed for the trailer the company had brought in. Bob waited until they were all inside with the door closed before edging toward the building. He knew it was stupid—any of the unsupported standing walls could topple at any minute—but all he could think of was Earl. At the barricade the men had thrown up, he paused to look right and left, then he clambered over.

  MRS. LORAINE WALKER SAILED into view of the big old abattoir. All was silent. She checked her watch. 11:45. She made a mental note to call the demolition company and find out if the university was being charged for time and costs or by the bid. Across the site, standing in the middle of Ames Road, she noticed that little man from the horticulture department with his head down and his hands in his pockets.

  KERI WAS walking slowly, all alone, back toward Dubuque House. She had not made her class, and the statistics professor had locked the door, the way he always did, just at the tick of 11:30. She was looking at her feet, but as she went behind Berkeley Hall, just on the side where they were tearing something down, she noticed the dust in the air and glanced up.

  CHAIRMAN XKEPT telling himself that he couldn’t waste his day watching this, and in addition to that couldn’t stand any more of the twisting pain in his chest that accompanied the sight, but even when the men were eating lunch and the machines were silent and still, he couldn’t seem to tear himself away. In a life based on the principle of passionate resistance, it did not seem to him as though he had even once staved off a single evil. Quite the contrary. The forces of greed, carnivorousness, exploitation, technology, and monoculture were everywhere more firmly in control than ever before.

  EARL BUTZ CAME OUT running. It was his only hope, his deepest instinct. Head down, trotters blazing, squealing like a wild razorback on the remotest Asian steppes, he blew past the giant machines, hustled over the slurry of snow, mud, and perennial roots they had made, and shot like a bobsled through a hole in their fence. Then he was on open ground, the whole campus before him. No, it was not green and fragrant, it was white and sterile. Had he expected what he knew—the farmer and his wife and dogs, other pigs, cats—he was disappointed. Here was nothing he even dimly recognized. But there was no turning back. His little home, safe and warm, was destroyed. Earl instinctively understood that he had to throw himself upon the frozen bosom of the world as he found it and hope for the best.

  BOB SAW him. He had wanted to see Earl so much, to know whether he was still alive, that he couldn’t quite take in the actual sight of him, as big as a Volkswagen Beetle but much faster, rocketing past. He raised his voice, as if Earl were a dog, and shouted, “Earl! Earl! Come here! Come here!” But coming on command was something he had never foreseen that Earl would need. He turned and clambered back over the fence, but Earl carried a lot of speed for such a large hog—over seven hundred pounds. As fast as Bob could go, Earl far outstripped him.

  MRS. LORAINE WALKER SAW him, and saw him for what he was, the secret hog at the center of the university, about whom she had been dismissing rumors for a year. He lumbered past, his high squealing underpinned by labored breathing, his white hide streaked with red where he had scraped himself. Something about the enormous, barrelling, frightening animal struck her as poignant. Even as she jumped back, she held out her hand as if to pat him on the head.

  CHAIRMAN X SAW HIM, but only from a distance, and from behind. Still preoccupied with the garden around the building, Chairman X barely glanced at the swiftly receding paleness of Earl’s haunches against the paler snow. He did hear the agonized squealing, which seemed to set the chill dry air to reverberating, and seemed, to Chairman X, to be the sound of his own grief, singing all around him.

  THE CAMPUS WAS not empty. Even though many students were in class, there were plenty abroad, present to stop and gawk at the flying hog and the kid running after him, but Earl had no interest in them. He looked neither right nor left as momentum carried him through space and time into a future that wasn’t prepared to receive him. As if understanding that, as if admitting the resulting perplexity, Earl slowed down. And when he slowed down, he was forced to reckon with the damage that his wild run had wreaked upon his bones and sinews. The fact was that he who was bred to eat and lie around was not bred to gallop. The new and excruciating var
iations on his old shooting pains nearly brought him to a gasping halt.

  But they did not. If he couldn’t run, he would walk. He lifted his head and staggered forward. It was then that he saw Keri, standing transfixed on the sidewalk beside Berkeley Hall. Was he drawn by her green coat? By something about her odor? By an instinctive animal recognition that she had served a year as Warren County Pork Queen? He made his way toward her even though his trotters were burning and freezing with a pain that seemed to rise up from the very earth itself.

  Keri stood her ground. The giant hog, a Landrace, probably, but bigger than any she had ever seen, more like a dining-room buffet than a hog, seemed to roll toward her somehow, and then stop just in front of her. He looked her in the eye, then leaned forward, as if to smell her, then fell forward onto his knees. His shooting pains focused and concentrated themselves in his left foreleg, and then exploded deep in his chest. He took a labored, heaving breath, and suddenly jerked over onto his side. His whole body trembled.

  Keri knelt down and looked into his still shining black eyes, then ran her hands over his enormous feverish head. Hesitantly, she began to scratch his ears.

  He gave another great shuddering breath that froze and hovered in the cold air, and then he closed his eyes.

  65

  The Ripple Effect

  DEAN THOUGHT the picture of the hog was funny. Of course he wouldn’t admit that since entering therapy, but Joy saw him smile as it passed his gaze. Now he was deep in the Sports section, and there it was across the table from her, unavoidable. Another dead animal. She was in therapy, too, and thinking Another dead animal in that way was very bad for her, so she looked down at her grapefruit. Arrayed around her grapefruit were five bites of Dean’s “Country Sunshine Big Breakfast” that she would have to eat before they would be able to leave the restaurant: hard scrambled eggs, a piece of biscuit, a spoonful of hash brown potatoes, a half-strip of bacon, and an elderly strawberry from far far away. Dean, under the influence of his therapist, had gone from haranguing and lecturing her to nurturing and supporting her. Long breakfasts at Denny’s were part of his program.

  Joy’s program involved choosing not to dwell on negative thoughts. That, and waiting for the medication to take hold. Her therapist had advised her to think of herself as an earthquake victim, trapped under a fallen roof beam (her mood). She didn’t have to take responsibility for the earthquake or the structural damage to the building. She only had to make choices that would lead to eventual rescue—calling for aid, maintaining hope, taking care of herself, guarding her strength, sustaining her faith in the drugs, which she was to imagine as eager, highly-trained German shepherds, barking excitedly as they closed in on the little dark room where she lay captive.

  Of course it didn’t help that the university had notified her that the equine management program was being cut, and she was to sell the university horse herd. She personally was being transferred to the Large Animal Hospital, where she would be taking care of patients, mostly equine, but some bovine. She would suffer no cut in pay. That was what she was supposed to focus on, no cut in pay. That was the sunny side of her street.

  The sunny side of Dean’s street was that he was finished with competitive, destructive, soul-destroying careerism, and intended to develop his long-buried and much-atrophied female side. As a shortcut to this end, he was teaching himself to write, throw a ball, use a knife or a scissors, and press the buttons on the TV remote with his left hand. His efforts were extremely helpful to his therapy, he reported. Just the previous night, his therapist had divulged in spite of herself that she had rarely seen a patient, maybe never seen a patient—and she had been doing therapy for fifteen years (that could be seven or eight thousand patients, which would put him in the 99.97th percentile for her patients alone)—break through to his vulnerabilities as fast as Dean had. He was sure it was the right-brain training, and there would easily be an academic paper, or even a best-selling book, a program, a video in that.

  And of course, Joy, as a born left-hander, had an inherent understanding of a whole realm of thought and feeling that Dean was only beginning to discover. Together, with Dean guiding Joy toward wisdom that she already possessed—!

  Well, the possibilities were endless.

  But the first thing he had learned in his new life was easy does it, one step at a time, slow and steady wins the race.

  Joy downed the bite of hash browns and suppressed a sigh. Sighs, Joy had discovered, made Dean crazy with worry.

  She put the bite of eggs onto the bite of biscuit and made herself chew it up, then swallow it. The truth was that between Dean and the two therapists, all she had to do was follow instructions and wait for her chemical rescue. Depression, which was what she had, would gradually lift. Her ruminations of the last six months, which had at least seemed true, if not reassuring, would turn out to have been contentless. The vessels of thought would fill, of their own accord, with a rosier, bubblier liquid as soon as the drugs kicked in. Even this feeling she had to contend with lately, that she had been at last cheated of everything, would drain away and be forgotten.

  She picked up the strawberry by its limp stem, flipped it back and forth with her finger, then put it in her mouth. She could barely taste it. She chose not to think a negative thought, that the strawberry was tasteless, but to think rather that her taste buds, now strangely inert, would sooner or later perk up.

  Dean put down the newspaper, smiled at her supportively, and after that, she couldn’t actually see the hog, she could only choose whether or not to imagine him.

  • • •

  HELEN HAD two yearly rituals that worked as her spring tonic. She always planted early potatoes, usually a yellow boiling variety, on St. Patrick’s Day, and she always threw spinach seed out the back door onto the remaining snow around the fringes of the patio. The spinach that resulted from the icy, gradually warming conditions of the snow-melt would be especially moist and dark green, sweet, succulent, and filled with vitamins, perhaps as early as the first week in May.

  Of course there was pruning to do, and raking back the mulch to expose the black innards of her vegetable and flower beds to the warming rays of the sun. And there was the postequinoctial sun itself—Helen liked to feel the prickle of it on her scalp, and the responding inner surge of vitamin D going into production. All of these activities had, in the past, been guaranteed to act upon the waiting self, like smiling in the mirror acted on sadness—mere performance raised your expectation of imminent delight.

  But this year, the fact was she was merely doing it. She could not bring to her progress around the yard the stateliness or significance or focus of years gone by. She didn’t take the time to cut the potatoes into two or three eye-sections, but planted whole ones. She let the spinach seed fly in bunches that would have to be thinned later. She forgot to look for snowdrops, crocuses, pungent moist onion shoots. She shivered in the cool wind and hurried so that she could get back inside.

  Inside, however, there was no fire in the grate, no book half-read, waiting to enthrall her again, no stockpot simmering, not even the simplest loaf of bread rising on the radiator. Inside, outside, nothing to look forward to, and, to tell the truth, no forward-looking spirit. Was this an omen of the marriage she had agreed to? In the weeks since Ivar’s proposal, she had come up with no reason to get married—that is, no reason except the one—that their orbit had brought them so close to marriage that were they to rocket away from it now at her insistence, the delicious, many-layered comfort of the life they had made for the last five years might vanish altogether.

  After tossing the seed, she paused for a moment, waiting for some burgeoning, springlike thing to happen to her spirit, but the flat, bleached sky held as little promise as the frozen ground and the impersonally cold and steady wind, which was the sort of wind you imagined might blow on Mars.

  • • •

  MARGARET WAS on the phone with the chairman of the English department at the University of Wiscon
sin. She kept trying to speak in a normal tone of voice, but it was impossible. The knowledge that her colleagues were passing in the corridor outside her closed door was too disconcerting. The chairman said again, “I’m sorry, Professor Bell, but could you speak up? I’m having a very hard time understanding you.”

  “I said, ‘I might actually consider a junior position.’ ”

  “Oh, goodness me,” said the chairman. “I am sorry. We made that hire. The, uh, deans felt that we just simply couldn’t afford you.”

  “Oh,” said Margaret brightly, hiding how deeply she felt the painful pop of the stimulating, diverse, and desirable bubble that had been her imagined future in Madison, Wisconsin.

  ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR TIMOTHY MONAHAN looked up from the memo on his desk (“… regret that all promotions are frozen for FY 90-91 and into the foreseeable future”) and shouted, “Come in!” and the door opened, and an extremely odd-looking woman stepped inside and started removing her coat. Only after she said, “Hola,” did he realize that he was looking at Cecelia. He gasped.

  She said, “Why does it seem colder today than it has all winter? I feel like I can’t possibly get warm!” She let the door slam behind her.

  Tim set aside his lingering distraction over the memo he had been reading and made himself look past her. Her hair was gone. The thick, curly mass that always seemed to be about to spring free of its pins and combs had disappeared, only to be replaced by a much diminished head that reminded him of an eggplant or pumpkin covered with AstroTurf. He said, trying to make his voice sound helpful, “You know, you lose sixty percent of your body heat through your scalp.”

  “I knew you would notice!” she exclaimed.